Opposable Thumbs —

The final total for the Child’s Play drive: $10,890

We have our total for the Opposable Thumbs Child's Play drive: $10,890. We got …

We first posted about starting a drive for Child's Play at Opposable Thumbs back in November, and things snowballed from there. We were able to put together a nice selection of prizes to get the ball rolling, but donations really took off when we showed everyone the massive collection of Super Nintendo RPGs that was to be the grand prize. To date, you have completely smashed every expectation we had for this drive. At first we started blindly, and then we simply kept upping the goal as donations poured in. Today, I'm happy to announced our total: $10,890. Frankly, I'm amazed. Let's break down just how generous everyone has been so far:

Donations, by the numbers

Total monetary amount raised: $10,890

Number of entries into the contest: 2,178

Total number of donations: 106

Average donation: $102

Largest donation: $710

Smallest donation: Trick question, there is no such thing as a small donation. So many people gave between $5 and $20 that we couldn't have gotten this far without them.

I'm still trying to work out the logistics of the raffle. We were originally simply going to put names in a hat, but that was before we knew how large things would become. I don't know that I have a hat big enough for 2,178 names. What I'll mostly do is purchase a large number of raffle tickets and give everyone a range of numbers before shaking them up and pulling the numbers.

Remember, the order in which we pull names is going to be the order in which you get to choose your prize. This will allow you more control over what you win, since we'd hate to give away the RPGs to someone who would have preferred the Zune or the casual games. I'm going to conduct the drawing this weekend, and release the list of winners in order on Monday.

I'd like to thank everyone again, this was a huge success and has been amazingly fun to put together. The donations have been impressive, the e-mails have been moving, and you've all made many, many children very happy with your donations and gifts. Child's Play as an entity has raised $1,135,000 in toys and cash this year, and being a part of that has been a wonderful experience.

I can't wait to do this again next year. Thank you for making this year so special.